Gaming Weekly 17/06/2016 – E3 2016 Round-Up

Each week our dedicated team of gamers will gather some of the top gaming news and announcements from the last seven days and deliver them here to you, our fellow players!

In this edition we’ll be bringing you a run down of our top stories from E3 which has seen news galore emerging from the annual Los Angeles event from the likes of Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo as well as all the top name publishers!

Microsoft Announces Xbox One S and Teases Project Scorpio:

After leaking just before E3 started there has been official confirmation and announcement of the sleeker, slimmer, sharper Xbox One S – Dubbed the most advanced Xbox ever it comes 4K Ultra HD capable and is 40% smaller than the regular Xbox One.

The image that surfaced over the weekend on the NeoGAF forums was indeed to be believed and Microsoft has now launched the Xbox One S to the ravenous masses at E3 with a $299 price tag and an August 2016 release date – which isn’t that far off at all!

As well as the Xbox One S, Microsoft touched on its long rumoured “Project Scorpio” which company gaming boss Phil Spencer claims “is more powerful than the original Xbox One, four and a half times. And the six teraflops will impact the games and how they play”. When launched in 2017 Project Scorpio will run both existing Xbox One games, with upscaling ability, and also a range of Project Scorpio only games.

Yesterday Sony announced to the world at E3 their plans for the year ahead and what is soon to be released. The presenter explained that the Sony VR will be available to the public on October 13th 2016 to accompany the processing power of the (over 40 million units sold worldwide) PS4.

Over 50 games will be released on VR upon launch in October up until the end of 2016.

These will include some of their biggest franchises along with future favourites that will be born from PS VR…

The PlayStation VR will be priced at $399 USD, which is quite steep when you consider that it is an add-on for a console

Vince Zampella CEO for Respawn Entertainment bringing Titanfall 2 for PS 4 to the table, showing a glorious preview of what is to come for the Titan fall series, with stunning visuals and intuitive mechanical combat but most importantly it looks exciting, some things a lot of games lack.

The game play shown in the trailer, would only be described as immense, the player ability to jump, fly, hover, grapple hook and throw out some form of gravity weapon pulling all who would appose in to the abyss. A wide selection of weapons, titan suites and an array of accessories enhancing game play and combat experience.

E3 has been a good year so far for EA, it’s had the fortune to be able to bring some heavy hitters to the table, what with Mass Effect Andromeda, Battlefield 1, and Titanfall 2, but it doesn’t stop there. They had some other major reveals this year.

The first big surprise was EA Originals, and its accompanying game Fe, likely to be a big hit it’s been covered in its own right.

The second big deal was EA making a drastic commitment to the world of E-Sports. E-Sports have come a long way in the past couple of years, with a vast increase in attention, prizes, and uptake. EA have apparently decided to seize on this by throwing their hat into the ring which the EA Competitive Gaming Division.

EA didn’t stop there, they wanted to show off their commitment to the Star Wars franchise. A wise move considering the impending release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. To this end they took us through a whirlwind ride of the developers building star wars themed games to be with us in the future.

As with most years at E3, Bethesda brought plenty of Elder Scrolls based news with them. Unfortunately it wasn’t Elder Scrolls: 6, but there was a little information on everything else Scrolls related.

The first Elder Scrolls related bit presented at the Bethesda conference involved Elder Scrolls Legends, a collectable card game in a similar format to Hearthstone. The game trailer was presented in an animated comic style, and voiced by a moth priest (you’ll remember these guys from Skyrim).

The game is confirmed as free to play and confirmed to be coming to us across a plethora of formats, mostly mobile and computer related. A cynical person would view this as Bethesda’s attempt to climb aboard the CCG bandwagon, but we’ll have to wait for the game to leave beta to find out if this is the case or if the game can stand on its own merits.

Along with the expected gamut of Elder Scrolls information came the follow up on the status of Fallout over the coming year, and it came in two varieties. The first the flavoursome Fallout 4 DLC barrage and the second being an update on Fallout Shelter.

We’ll tackle the Fallout 4 downloadable content first. This appears to take three forms. Two updates to the Workshop, and a third as yet mystery update teased with a video of a Nuka-World theme park entrance.

The two Workshop updates are coming as their own forms. The first, will be named Contraptions Workshop and is going to involve the creation of things such as conveyor belts, sorting machines, pillories and things of a similar ilk, it seems to be more focused on the industrialisation of your settlements, the teaser shown actually showing something akin to a manufacturing plant.

The second Workshop related DLC takes the form of the Vault-Tec Workshop, this one looks to be aimed at the moving of your settlers to underground locales, why search for vaults when you can build your own. The video actually showed a great deal, allowing you to build a fully functioning vault with all the available mod cons, whether this allows you to hollow out mountains to place your vault within or whether there are specific vault locations remains to be seen however.

The final piece of Fallout 4 downloadable content comes in the form of a teased video for Nuka-World, a theme park based around the popular tipple. It’s been stated to be the final DLC for the game, and the second story based DLC. It’ll be interesting seeing what the Nuka theme park has in store for our characters, especially considering that a large part of the description paints it as a “lawless city of raiders”.

At E3 Hideo Kojima made his comeback after his unceremonious end with Konami last year. The split which is far from being called amicable, ended the development of the Silent Hill sequel and seemingly put the brakes on a collaboration between the famed developer and director Guillermo Del Toro.

During the Sony conference to a great deal of surprise, out came Hideo Kojima, we hadn’t expected him to make an appearance, all his studio Kojima Productions has provided us with lately has been some frankly exciting looking work pertaining to the logo.

Kojima had brought with him what can only be described as an acid tip of a trailer. The game is called Death Stranding and what we know about it is only that it has Norman Reedus in it, a returned collaborator from the crushed Silent Hill experiment with Konami.

The Legend of Zelda – Breath of the Wild Announced and It’s Actually Breath-taking:

After four years since first announcing it, Nintendo has finally treated us a good look at its long-teased newLegend of Zelda game for Wii U – as well as the yet to be launched NX – and it’s absolutely breath-taking.

Whisking us back to Hyrule Kingdom in a massive scale adventure, the debut trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, features lavish landscapes that include lush grassy plains, deserts, oceans and vast mountain ranges as far as the eye can see – visions of an absolutely huge open world that sets the scale for a game as grand and with as many feels as Ocarina of Time gave us when it was first released.

Nintendo is going all out with showcasing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild over at E3 this week and it might just be the saving grace for the Wii U. But hopefully it’s not too late.

So much to tell, but just watch the trailer – We’re sure you have, so just watch it again. That Master Sword though.